Review 15: Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow
There is a certain style of adventure module that absolutely hits all the check boxes for me, and that is the "Interesting Town with Lots of Fun Stuff to Uncover Nearby" style. Whenever you look at lists of top tier sandbox-style adventures written in the post-OSR era, you always see mentions of The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, Blackapple Brugh, and others that follow that same kind of format. This week, I'm talking about another one of those that fully deserves its place on the list of greats-- Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow by Joseph R. Lewis.
The general premise of the adventure is that the PCs have returned to their home town after a long absence to find a strange situation-- the temple has been sealed by a shimmering golden dome that nobody can penetrate, trapping many villagers within. It is then up to the party to ask around the town and investigate the surrounding area to find clues as to what happened, and eventually find a way to access the temple to rescue the trapped villagers and defeat the evil contained within.
Getting it to the Table
As you can see by the cover art, I'm specifically focusing on the new edition of this adventure that was recently published by The Merry Mushmen, who also converted it from its original form to be run with Old School Essentials. Being the weirdo that I am, I decided instead to run it with Cairn, and I have shared my conversion notes on the Cairn adventures page. The conversion itself was pretty simple, and I've written about the process before so I won't take up space here.
As for actually preparing the adventure to run at the table, it was pretty seamless. The layout of the book is superb, thanks to the talented Mushmen, and it is densely packed with usable information. There is a brief bit of introduction and background for the GM, and then we are given a great list of hooks that tie the PCs to the developing situation in the town and hands out leads to all of the great encounters that can be found in the surrounding areas. On top of that, there is a set of rumors that each have a paired contradictory rumor about the same thing-- A+!
Once the scene is set and the party is made aware of the Big Situation at the temple, the adventure really opens up into a sandbox, and the area descriptions play into this well. Every location in town has a nice efficient description of the spot and the NPC, who each have potential information or hooks to share when the PCs interact with them. The single aspect of the town that I didn't like was that the paper mill was named "Dun'Myff". This was the only fourth-wall breaking wink to the reader, and it felt so out of place. Thankfully, my players never went there so I didn't have to come up with a new name on the fly.
In general, the area descriptions were compact, efficient, and usable, with monster stat blocks and magic item descriptions exactly where you needed them. Another notable thing to point out are the area maps for the surrounding adventure sites-- the Gloam Wood, the Wailing Hills, and the Bleak Mountains. These are beautiful little pointcrawl maps that detail the amount of time it takes to travel to each point, which makes determining when random encounters should be rolled for a simple process. The tables themselves deserve honorable mention as well, as they weren't simply wandering monsters; they also included non-combat encounters or just nice little atmospheric things to help bring the world to life.
One minor critique that I had was with the map of the various floors of the temple. They were presented it a very old-school fashion, but I would have liked a little bit more detail about map features. As it is, you have to make some assumptions about distances, whether doors are locked or unlocked, and what marks on the map indicate windows vs doors and such. A key would have been simple to add for that. However, ultimately it didn't have a very negative impact on my game, so it remains a minor quibble.
Another aspect that really helped the GM get a sense of the pacing and flow of the adventure was the events timeline that drives the main plot. It is laid out very clearly and allows the GM to create a growing sense of dread in the town as the nightmares begin to leak out of the temple, and my players were definitely starting to feel the pressure as the bell kept tolling few and fewer times...
What Worked?
- Beautiful, easy-to-use layout, dense with information but still usable
- Amazing amount of content crammed into about 80 pages. My group spent 10 two to three hour sessions on this one, and they did not even visit every encounter site but stayed focused on the main plotline.
- Fantastic art throughout that really captured the feeling of the adventure and translated it to the GM (and the players when I showed them certain pieces)
What Didn't Work?
- Interior maps could have been a little more detailed
- I personally did not find a use for the "Ragdolls", a rival gang of youngsters who seem like they were intended to be on similar quests to the PCs. This could boil down to playstyle though.
- Dun'Myff :(
Final Thoughts
I'll start out by saying that this is probably one of my favorite adventures that I've come across in a long time. There's so much to do, and so many weird things to discover, and they all tie together. You really can't go to a single place without finding a potential hook to another area that then leads you back to the main story. I was running this as part of an open table Cairn game, and now that the main plotline is finished, the town of Ragged Hollow is going to continue as the "home base" for the game, as there is quite a bit of content in the surrounding regions that the players never investigated. Also, being an out-of-the-way town in the middle of nowhere is perfect for modularity, and it will be easy to knit this into a larger region. Perhaps the players will visit Brandonsford or Blackapple in the near future...
You can get the new edition of Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow from the Merry Mushmen webstore and I highly recommend it! Thanks for reading!